Remember the wider context: number of deaths in Afghanistan, 1989 – 2017

Inevitably, from time to time, you tweet something out without having properly processed it. This piece of data now strikes me. It comes from the highly credible Uppsala Conflict Data Program. A problem is judging accurately the level of casualties in the Afghan series of conflicts. But this data, with that caveat, works as a good context-setter for the debates over casualty levels in contemporary Afghanistan. It hadn’t quite sunk in for me that the current levels of violence appear to be significantly higher than the worst excesses of the Taliban vs Northern Alliance civil war period…